The Climate Investigations Center has sued the U.S. Department of Energy to force the release of records pertaining to Southern Company’s “clean coal” power plant in Kemper County, Mississippi.

In a lawsuit filed late last week in federal District Court in Washington, D.C., CIC noted that it has waited almost a year for the release of records spanning a period in the late nineties through 2010 during which the technology deployed at Kemper was being developed and the plant was planned and construction took place.

CIC’s Freedom of Information Act request notes that Southern Company subsidiaries Mississippi Power and Southern Company Services were granted a total of $293 million in DOE funds, as well as hundreds of millions in tax credits from the Internal Revenue Service, to defray the enormous cost of what eventually became a 582 megawatt power facility.

DOE originally agreed to fund a coal project in Orlando, Florida that was about half the size of Kemper. While the Orlando facility was to employ a first-of-its-kind technology that would burn coal more cleanly than older plants, it was not designed to capture carbon dioxide from the plant’s waste stream.

Kemper theoretically will remove 65 percent of the carbon dioxide from the waste stream, compress it, and send it through a pipeline for injection into old oil fields to boost production – a process called Enhanced Oil Recovery.

However, Kemper’s gasifier, which is supposed to turn cheap, low-grade lignite coal into synthetic gas that would then be burned to produce electricity, failed to operate during tests that began this past fall.

On February 2nd, Mississippi Power notified the Securities and Exchange Commission that after some six years of construction and five months of tests, the gasifier still doesn’t work, and the company now doesn’t expect the plant to come on line as a bona-fide coal-burning CCS facility until the third quarter of 2016.

The SEC filing blamed “challenges in ongoing start-up and commissioning activities, including repairs and modifications to the refractory lining inside the gasifiers, as well as operational readiness.”

The filing also acknowledged that the additional delay will add $142 million to the project’s costs, bringing its total price tag to $6.64 billion.

CIC hopes its FOIA to the Department of Energy will shed more light on a project that seems to have gone terribly wrong, producing double digit increases in electricity rates and, so far, not actually burning any coal – cleanly or otherwise. The plant’s turbines, which finally began generating electricity in the summer of 2015, are running on natural gas.

Perhaps that is temporary. But if it isn’t, Kemper will be first of its kind in another way – the most expensive natural gas plant per kilowatt ever built.

The plant’s chequered history raises urgent questions about the federal government’s substantial investment in carbon capture and sequestration technology, which has so far failed everywhere it’s been tried, and the wisdom of funding projects like Kemper and Edwardsport, in Illinois, that haven’t worked.

The CIC’s FOIA seeks to illuminate why DOE handed Southern Company such a large sum for such a speculative technology, and why it approved the relocation of the plant from the populous area around Orlando to the poorest county in Mississippi where it would be part of a service territory containing only 186,000 ratepayers. Those ratepayers will have to foot much of the bill for a $6.6 billion coal plant – a sum larger than the 2015 budget for the entire state.